Icy Clutches (12 page)

Gideon didn't answer. With his tongue between his teeth, he was busy probing with a ballpoint pen at the collapsed browpiece of the glasses, a thin, straight band of metal folded into a U-shaped trough and then crimped to hold the missing plastic lens. After a few seconds he managed to get the point between the crimped edges and push out onto his palm the tiny, shiny particle that had caught his eye. He looked at it briefly, then turned his hand over so that it dropped onto the white Formica surface of the little table in front of him. A scrap of broken plastic no bigger than a fingernail paring. Gleaming. Transparent.

Tangerine-colored.

A murmur went around the group, a soft “ah” of appreciation.

"Those Jimmy's then?” Pratt asked huskily. He had gotten out of his chair to come tentatively closer.

"It looks as if they are,” Gideon said gently. He held the frames out to him on the palm of his hand.

Pratt pulled momentarily back as if they might sting him, then came forward again, taking them gingerly from Gideon, turning them over, staring at them, trying to find God knows what. The muscles in his throat worked.

"Just turned twenty-five,” he said thickly. “My baby brother, you know."

Abruptly he thrust the frames back at Gideon. With his other hand he stuck his pipe into his mouth and took two quick, furious puffs, blowing out rather than sucking in. Glowing sparks of tobacco popped from the metal bowl.

"Would I get to keep ‘em?” he asked. “After you people've finished with ‘em?"

"I think so,” Gideon said. Empathy had made his own throat tight. “I can't see why not."

"Good, then.” He wiped the back of his hand across his nose, shrugged, and went back to his chair, chewing on the pipe. The shoulders of his bright blue coveralls hunched slackly away from his body as he sat down, as if he had shrunk inside them.

"Well, then,” Gideon said into the awkward silence, “one more thing."

As soon as he took the broken ice ax from the sack, Anna spoke out sharply.

"It's one of ours. An Alpiner."

Judd nodded gravely. “Right you are. I remember."

"Were they all exactly the same?” Gideon asked. “Is there any way to distinguish one from another?"

"After thirty years,” Tremaine snapped, “you expect us to remember who wrapped red tape around the handle and who used yellow? Not that there's any tape left on this one. Really, is there some purpose to this?"

"I'm just trying to come up with anything that might be useful in identifying the remains. If we knew for sure whose ice ax that was, it could help."

"Well, it seems as if you'll have to figure it out on your own,” Tremaine said impatiently. He closed the loose-leaf binder in front of him, tucked it under his arm, and stood up with the brittle agility of a man who worked hard at aging gracefully. “Thank you for coming, Dr. Oliver. And now, if there's nothing else, the fire is dead, the Icebreaker Lounge is open for business, and I, for one, am in dire need of the comfort of a Rob Roy.” With a nod he was gone, his rich voice seeming to hang in the air behind him.

Tremaine's voice was all his own. Like the larger-than-life stars of Hollywood's golden era—Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne—he had created a way of speaking that was to be found in no one else on the planet. Lush but nasal, British but American, elegant but intimate.

About what you'd expect, was Gideon's grumpy and uncharitable thought, if you crossed John Gielgud with W. C. Fields.

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"Five-squad. Lau."

"Mr. Lau? The SAC would like to see you, please."

With his shoulder hunched to prop the telephone receiver against his ear, John continued to fill out a quarterly progress report. Christ, the bureau put you through a lot of paperwork. Which was saying something, coming from a man who had put in four years in the NATO Security Directorate.

"Now?” he said, writing.

"Well, no, naturally not,” Charlie Appletree's secretary purred, “not if you have something more important to do."

"Yeah, well, you see, my paper clips have gotten kind of tangled up and I was counting on separating them this afternoon. And you know how the telephone cord gets all twisted around itself? I was planning—"

Melva switched to her gravel voice, one of many, “All right, Lau. Get your ass up here right now.” Melva was a buxom, apple-cheeked woman in her fifties who had been Appletree's secretary for twenty-two years. Sassing whoever she pleased was one of her undisputed perks. “Or do you want me to come down there and drag you up by the—"

"No, ma'am,” John said. “Right away, ma'am."

Smiling, he headed for the stairwell and climbed to the seventh floor. Appletree's office was an airy, properly impressive corner room in various shades of tan, with two big windows looking down rain-wet Madison Street toward the Seattle waterfront. There was a slate-gray sliver of Puget Sound visible between the buildings if you leaned in the right direction and looked hard. The other two windows, the ones overlooking the enormous peeling painting of Canadian geese in flight on the side of the old Warshall's sporting-goods building, and beyond that the tacky storefronts of First Avenue, were discreetly shuttered by beige venetian blinds.

The huge kidney-shaped desk—a table really, with no drawers—held a blotter, a small vase of fresh daisies, a picture of Appletree's wife and children, and a pen-and-pencil set on a marble base. There wasn't a paper on the oiled walnut top and there never was, a fact that always impressed visitors. John, however, was aware that the inconspicuous door to the left of the desk did not open into a small room with a cot, as was popularly believed, but into a comfortable office with an old desk that was every bit as cluttered as John's was.
This
big room, with its American flag, its wall-mounted FBI seal, and its authoritative serenity, was strictly for guests; a reception room, so to speak.

Appletree was at the desk speaking into a dictating machine, his jacket off, immaculate white shirtsleeves turned back onto hairless forearms in wide, crisply perfect folds. When John came in he gestured toward the grouping of upholstered chairs around a coffee table in the corner.

Atop the table was a small, dark-brown bust with a lean, long-nosed head. On his first visit to the office, John, nervously looking for something to talk about, had picked it up and examined it.

"You're looking at my hero,” Appletree had said. “Know who it is?"

"Lincoln? Before he had a beard?"

"Machiavelli."

John still didn't know whether it was or it wasn't. He'd found a picture of Machiavelli somewhere and concluded that Appletree might have been telling the truth.

The SAC came over to join him and fell into one of the chairs, rubbing the top of his crew cut with the flat of his hand. It sounded like a scrubbing brush on tile.

"Well, your pal did it again."

"My pal?” Not that he couldn't sense what was coming. “Oliver. He screwed things up again."

"In one day?"

Appletree put his hands in his pockets, stretched out his legs, and leaned the back of his head against the high back of his chair, looking up at the ceiling. “Amazing, isn't it."

"What do you mean, screwed up?"

"As in ‘complicated.'” He tilted his head back to level and looked at John. “He says those bones show evidence of homicide."

John stared at him. “Murder by avalanche?"

"Murder by pickax. Ice ax, rather. You have any idea what an ice ax is?"

John shook his head. “So then the bones aren't from those scientists who got caught in the avalanche?"

"Wrong. They are."

"I don't get it."

"Join the crowd, John."

Melva came in holding a mug in each hand: tea for the SAC and coffee for John.

"So glad you were able to make it, Mr. Lau,” she said pleasantly.

"I believe John takes cream, Melva,” Appletree said, “and sugar too. Right, John?"

It was like Appletree to remember that kind of personal detail, even with seventy agents working for him. John smiled. The SAC probably kept a file on everyone in that little office next door and reviewed it before anybody came in.

Appletree took a couple of sips from his mug and set it on the coffee table. “Now, the thing is, there's some confusion over just who's going to handle the case."

"How come? Doesn't the Park Service have, what do you call it, proprietary jurisdiction?"

"Well, yes, technically, but the chief ranger's asked the bureau to come in and run things. It's federal land, so it's a legitimate request. The guy's really shorthanded because all his seasonal help are gone. And, frankly, I don't think he's too keen on running a homicide investigation."

"Okay, so what's the problem? There's an FBI office in Juneau, isn't there?"

"Yes, but there's only one resident agent, and he's close to filing on a big drug case. He just can't spare the time. Anchorage says they can't either. Even the state police say they don't have people to help out."

"I'm getting the impression nobody's too anxious to take this on."

"Well, think about it. Corpus delicti consists of some rags and a few old bones dug out from under an avalanche along with a broken ice ax. Hotshot professor comes along and
alleges
it adds up to murder. But he can't say who's been murdered. Case file not opened—not even thought about—until almost thirty years after the fact. Talk about cold leads. It's no wonder they don't want to waste any manpower on it. How'd you like to have a case like that dumped in your lap?"

"No, thanks."

Appletree's lipless but disarmingly youthful grin suddenly split his face. “Well, you've got it.” He rubbed the top of his head again, looking pleased with himself.

"Me?
What the hell do I have to do with Alaska?"

"Actually, it's very logical. In the first place, in 1960, at the time this happened—if it happened—the Juneau office reported to Seattle, so it would have legitimately been our baby from the start. If anyone had known about it."

"Oh, yeah, that's really logical."

"Second, this was a U-Dub expedition. Whoever those bones belong to, he was from here, not from there. So's the number-one suspect."

"We've actually got a suspect? Terrific. What is he, ninety years old now?"

"I'll tell you about that later. Third, you've worked with Oliver before. You're the one who got him involved."

"Now we're getting down to it. This is a disciplinary assignment, right, boss?"

Appletree laughed. “You're working on the Tackney Mutual file, aren't you? Why don't you turn that over to Mintner and get on this instead? Glacier Bay's only three hours by air. You could start tomorrow morning. Well, couldn't you?"

"Yes, sir, I guess so."

"Good. Give it a shot, see what you can do. If you're not getting anywhere at all by, say, Friday, we can quietly drop it.” His expression sobered. “Look, John, if you'd really rather not—"

John shook his head, smiling. “I'll take it."

He was, in fact, pleased, as he was sure Appletree knew. Tackney Mutual was a fire-insurance underwriting firm involved in a massive, complex case of interstate insurance fraud. John had spent the last three days at his desk, analyzing endless columns of mind-numbing claim-report breakdowns. Just the kind of case that made him grind his teeth. A straightforward homicide was a lot more down his alley. Not that “straightforward” seemed to be the word here.

"I thought you would,” Appletree said. He tore a slip of paper from a pad and gave it to John. “The chief park ranger's name is Owen Parker. Give him a call at this number and let him know you're coming."

"Will do."

"And we've started a case file on it. They're making copies of the serials for you downstairs. Probably ready by now."

"Okay, I'll check with clerical as soon as we're done."

"Clerical! Good heavens, man, we don't have clerks. We have,” he said solemnly, “support staff."

"Right, I keep forgetting. Do I report to Anchorage on this or what?"

"No, we treat this as if we're the OO."

"The OO?"

Appletree shook his head in amiable wonder. “John, you're amazing. How do you manage to function so effectively in this bureaucratic maze? Do you really not know what ‘OO’ means?"

John ran a finger around the inside of his shirt collar. “Well—"

"The OO is the originating office,” Appletree said, picking up a small pitcher of real cream that Melva had deposited on the table, “the office with the primary responsibility for a case."

"I'll try to remember."

"Do. For one thing it saves time; two syllables instead of whatever. And, of course,” he added with a smile, “if we went around saying things like ‘originating office,’ everybody would know what we were talking about. And we certainly wouldn't want that, would we?"

He poised the creamer over John's mug. “Let's see, if I remember right, you like it heavy on the cream."

Why was it, Gideon had sometimes wondered, that his students got so possessive about their chairs? Even when seating at the first class meeting was random or arbitrary, they headed right for the same places the next time and forever after. Try to rearrange things and there were groans of frustration and despair.

The phenomenon, he now noted, was not limited to the classroom. By this, the third predinner cocktail hour since their arrival, the seating arrangement in the Icebreaker Lounge was fixed and apparently immutable. There were Tremaine and his admirers in possession of the bar. There were Anna Henckel, Walter Judd, and Gerald Pratt at their corner window table. There were the customary groupings of trainees. When Julie and Gideon had come in at five-thirty, half an hour into things, their table, directly before the fireplace with its newly laid log fire, was waiting for them as if it had been reserved.

They downed hot apple ciders while Gideon brought her up to date. He had just come back from the bar with seconds when Owen Parker came in, got a 7-Up, and headed their way. It was the first time they'd seen him in the cocktail lounge. He was in uniform, the only ranger who was. But then he was the only one on duty.